Obama Takes Over White House Press Briefing To Speak On Trayvon Martin

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama made an unexpected appearance at Friday's White House press briefing to talk about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin case and, more broadly, how the United States continues to grapple with racial bias.

"When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," Obama said.

Obama said he understands why people are so upset that George Zimmerman was found not guilty for shooting and killing Martin, an unarmed teen who was walking down the street in Sanford, Fla., in February 2012. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, pursued Martin for no clear reason and ultimately shot him in what he said was self-defense.

The president urged the nation to accept the court's verdict, saying the judge conducted the trial "in a professional manner" and that the jury had made its decision.

But in an unusually personal moment, he began talking about the broader context of the case and the need to better understand the experiences of black men in this country.

"I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away," Obama said. "There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me."

He went on to recount instances when he had heard "the locks click on the doors of cars" as he walked down the street. African-American men are used to getting into an elevator and seeing a fellow passenger "clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off," he said.

"I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida," Obama said. "And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear."

Obama also pointed to the fact that young African-American men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, both as perpetrators of violence and as its victims. And that violence, he noted, often takes place in poor black neighborhoods that are "born out of a very violent past in this country." The poverty and dysfunction in those communities "can be traced to a very difficult history," he said.

Obama said he's going to be thinking about what steps he can take as president in the wake of the ruling. He put forward the idea of meeting with local and state officials to come up with ways to provide more training to law enforcement on racial bias, and he also suggested that he plans to examine certain states' Stand Your Ground laws.

More generally, Obama lent support to the idea of creating a coalition -- of business leaders, elected officials, celebrities, athletes -- to address the need for African-American men to feel that they are "a full part of this society."

Obama's decision to speak on the verdict was a bit of a surprise. Several days had passed since it was issued on Saturday, and he had already put out an official statement. The conventional wisdom was that the president was wary of bringing more politics to an already sensitive issue. But both he and his advisers wanted to offer a bit more.

Speaking after the president finished his remarks, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that the process behind putting the impromptu speech together wasn't all that complicated. The president had been prepared to address the jury verdict in Zimmerman's trial had he been asked about it in one of the interviews he did this week, but he wasn't asked. Eventually, Obama met with the press office and decided to just address the issue. A Friday statement before the press corps was as good a time as any other.

"This is not hard at all," said Carney. "The president wanted to say something, and he opened the briefing today so he could say something."

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HuffingtonPost

Microsoft's Surface RT Didn't Have To Be A $900 Million Disaster

In some unknown warehouse presumably sits a pile of millions of beautiful, unused Surface RTs, the tablet computer that was supposed to resurrect Microsoft. Late Thursday, the company revealed for the first time that it has failed to entice many people to buy the product, and the software maker made an unexpected, $900 million writeoff on its unsold Surface inventory. The losses don't end there: On Friday morning, Microsoft shed $30 billion in value after its stock tumbled 10 percent.

According to one calculation, that loss translates to nearly 6 million sleek and rather stunning machines that consumers have decided they don't care to own. No matter how the math works out -- the company would not provide exact sales numbers -- that heap of Surfaces just burned a nearly $1 billion hole in Microsoft's pocket.

The irony of the Surface debacle is that Microsoft actually managed to design a product that many reviewers admired, but it failed anyway -- underscoring the degree to which this once-dominant technology company appears to be past its moment. Good, bad or mediocre, the Surface was apparently doomed on arrival because that arrival was way too late, with the market already claimed by Apple’s wildly popular iPad.

How did such a powerful company manage to engineer such a colossal loser?

A number of factors conspired -- each the result of a miscalculation from the company executives, which probably explains why CEO Steve Ballmer reshuffledleadership in Redmond and put one person, Julie Larson-Green, in charge of all hardware. Let's break down a few numbers on why this tablet bombed so badly:

• 30 months, or the amount of time between the release of Apple's first iPad and that of the Microsoft Surface. That, apparently, was all the time Apple needed to extend its walled-off ecosystem of apps and music to tablets. Had Microsoft foreseen that the world was ready to use slabs of glass as computers -- andhaving made an ahead-of-its-time tablet in the early 2000s, it should have -- it could have beat Apple to the punch.
• $100, or the difference between the cheapest full-sized iPad and the cheapest Surface RT (with cover) when it first arrived. Say you're the sort of luddite who hadn't gotten around to buying an iPad, and had to choose between it and the Surface. Advantage still goes to Apple if you own an iPhone with a bevy of purchased apps or own an iTunes account full of purchased songs. Microsoft could have still swayed that customer with a lower price point -- but decided that its tablet should be significantly more expensive. It took until this monthfor Microsoft to finally lower prices and undercut the iPad.
• 20 stores, or the number of physical retail locations Microsoft had open when it first announced the Surface. Taking a major cue from Apple, Microsoft now has a retail strategy of opening Microsoft-branded stores. Initially, the stores were going to be the only physical place where you could buy a Microsoft-branded tablet. But Business Insider counted only 20 Microsoft stores after the Surface was first announced. Even though the tablet could be ordered online, people often want to feel and test out something in real life before putting down hundreds of dollars to buy it.

Leaks suggest that Microsoft is expected to sell its second line of Surfaces within the year. Microsoft is one of the few companies rich enough to blow nearly a billion dollars selling a product and continue full-steam doing the same thing -- which, it should be noted, is some people's definition of insanity. Get ready to watch, GIF-like, Microsoft stumble again.

Or maybe not. As Yahoo News' Jason Gilbert points out, there was considerable excitement for the Surface when it was previewed at a hush-hush media event last year. When it finally went on sale, there were swarms at Microsoft Stores -- as if it was made by Apple! Reviews were mixed, but certainly not bad enough to scare away diehard Microsoft fans.

Even if sales didn't meet that stir, the hype showed a pent-up desire for a tablet that doesn't run on software made by Apple or Google. Microsoft is hoping the same thing is true of smartphones, and is having more success is that category. Windows Phones have edged out BlackBerry as the No. 3 operating system.

HuffingtonPost